Virginia school’s ‘anti-racist’ program has changed my son, mom saysBy Ryan Mills
May 13, 2022
When Melissa Riley looks at her 13-year-old son, she sees a talented artist, a funny kid who likes playing pranks, and a gamer who spends a lot of time playing Fortnite with friends.
She sees a young man who’s excited about playing football, and maybe taking some architecture and engineering courses when he starts high school next fall.
But that’s not what the teachers and leaders of her son’s Virginia middle school see, she said. When they look at her son, she believes they see one thing first and foremost: a black kid.
Growing up in the Charlottesville area, Riley said her son never really saw himself as different from the other kids in school. Sure, his skin tone was a little darker — his dad is black and Riley is white and Native American — but Riley never thought it was appropriate to box him in with stifling racial classifications.
“He looks Hawaiian,” she said of her son. “He’s beautiful.”
But she said her son’s views on race and his conception of his own complex identity have been tossed in a blender and mixed up ever since the Albemarle School District adopted an “anti-racism” policy, with an explicit goal of eliminating “all forms of racism” from the local schools.
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“He is changing,” Riley said of her son. “If things don’t go his way or things seem unfair, he will now claim it’s racism. He never did that before. He now identifies as a black man, because that’s how the school told him he looks and who he is.”
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Source:
https://nypost.com/2022/05/13/virginia-schools-anti-racist-program-has-changed-my-son-mom/
